Michael Walzer. J. Toby Reiner

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СКАЧАТЬ to have chosen the characteristics of their state, it is less clear that it does when states do not rest on consent. He concludes that unless “states have an independent, defensible claim to use the deadly force of war to resist all movements onto their territory or all attempts to alter their structure, the case against the initiation of war has not yet adequately been made out” (Wasserstrom 1978: 543).

      If just wars are fought to protect basic rights, Walzer makes several mistakes. First, he should not grant all states rights, just legitimate ones. Second, he should not insist that all just wars are wars of national defense but should broaden the scope for intervention such that wars fought to encourage rights-protection, reduce the likely incidence of future wars, and enhance the legitimacy of states around the world be considered just. Both Wasserstrom and Doppelt conclude that Walzer’s theory would not have allowed for intervention in apartheid South Africa, but should have done, while Luban insists that it ought to have allowed for intervention on behalf of the Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua in 1978 (Wasserstrom 1978: 544, Doppelt 1978: 23–4, Luban 1980a: 170–1). Neither the apartheid nor the Somoza regimes merited rights because they excluded the majority of the population from political participation and violated their basic rights. As a result, wars fought to establish legitimate regimes in those countries would, the critics suggest, have been legitimate.

By contrast, Walzer’s approach, while based on human rights, also attaches importance to community. It is a type of liberal approach – Walzer justifies the norm of non-intervention by appealing to John Stuart Mill’s claim that freedom can only be won internally, not imposed from outside (Walzer 2015a: 87–91, 1980a: 227–8; for discussion, Gavison 2014, Beitz 2014, Doyle 2014). This argument is mostly implicit in Wars, but Walzer spells it out much more fully in his important article “The Moral Standing of States” (Walzer 1980a) in which he responds to Wasserstrom, Beitz, Luban, and Doppelt (see also their responses: Beitz 1980, Luban 1980b, Doppelt 1980). Because, for Walzer, one of the central rights is that to collective self-determination, self-help is the appropriate formula in all but the most desperate of situations. The norm of non-intervention is, then, the means by which we respect peoples’ efforts to achieve freedom. That is, collective self-determination is something to which individuals have a right. Walzer concludes that the “distinction of state rights and individual rights is simplistic and wrongheaded” (Walzer 1980a: 234). Individuals need their communities to survive, because it is only within them that a shared life can be established and only with such a life that individuals can develop political friendship (233) and “express their inherited culture” (220). Moreover, communities need states if they are to enforce and protect individual rights (232), with global enforcement unlikely in the short run and potentially dangerous in the long (see Chapter 6 for discussion).

Walzer thus argues that outsiders owe people a presumption that states are legitimate and that there is a “fit” between states and the communities that they exist to protect, even though the state may in fact be illegitimate (Walzer 1980a: 221–5). Only if the absence of fit is “radically apparent,” as in the exceptions to the norm of non-intervention that Walzer allows (massacre, enslavement, civil war, and struggles for secession), can foreigners decide that the presumption of legitimacy does not hold and intervention is warranted (225–6). This is because, while we can assume that murder, slavery, and ethnic cleansing are everywhere condemned, the full range of liberal and democratic rights might not be valued by every culture. Walzer adds that outsiders should be wary of presuming absence of fit because they “don’t know enough about [the community’s] history … have no direct experience, and can form no concrete judgments … [of] the historical choices and cultural affinities” at work (220–1). It is important for understanding Walzer to note that this is not an empirical claim. Rather, it is ontological, and relates to the processes of meaning construction and identity formation. Foreigners can of course study history and culture, but the knowledge of which Walzer writes is at least partly experiential: it comes from sharing in a collective life. The legitimacy to which this gives rise is therefore political, not philosophical: it cannot be judged by timeless, objective criteria worked out by just-war theorists. Walzer concludes that his argument is “best understood as a defense of politics”; that of the critics reiterates the “traditional philosophical dislike for politics” (234; see also Walzer 1981).

      With regard to the cases his critics adduce, Walzer argues that intervention would have been warranted in apartheid South Africa, but because apartheid was not “ordinary oppression,” but rather a case of “near-slavery” that also constituted a national-liberation struggle (Walzer 1980a: 226). As a result, failure to intervene did not mean allowing a political process to work out the local meaning of freedom but denying the process itself. By contrast, Walzer denies that intervention in Nicaragua in defense of individual rights would have been legitimate. It would have violated “the rights of Nicaraguans as a group to shape their own political institutions and the rights of individual Nicaraguans to live under institutions so shaped” (227), and would pose a “radical challenge to communal integrity” (229), leading to remaking the whole world on liberal-democratic lines (229–32). The problem with such a remaking is its singularity, rejecting the history of social and political institutions in favor of granting wide latitude to international bureaucrats. Such a denial would lead to the destruction of common lives and make political participation on a local scale impossible. Yet, on Walzer’s account, participation in the community is one of the foremost individual rights because of its role in identity formation (234, Walzer 1983: 31–63).

Walzer’s justification of the claim that humanitarian intervention is legitimate only in exceptional cases is important in illuminating his contribution to theorizing about war and to political theory more broadly. He grounds state rights on a domestic analogy with individual rights because the rights in question are on his view individual rights, collectively held. That is, the state does not, in Walzer’s theory, have any intrinsic moral importance, but it is important to its citizens (Walzer 1988b, Reiner 2017b), who tend to wish to see it reformed as a result of domestic political action, not replaced by cosmopolitan representatives of the world community. Moreover, Walzer relies on the war convention because it defends a pluralist international order in which different communities of women and men struggle in different ways to achieve and advance different conceptions of what makes life valuable. This is, in Walzer’s just-war theory, what we should aim for unless the community attempts to interfere with the bare rights to life and liberty that all human beings need to continue living and that therefore underlie all legitimate states. While basic rights to life and liberty are universal, Walzer therefore does not require or expect each community to be a liberal democracy. Indeed, he would later argue that “democratic idealism” – commitment to each people governing itself by its own standards – means rejecting the universal claims of liberal democracy (Walzer 1994a: 58). Because freedom is a collective product that must be continually rethought and reworked, Walzer attaches great importance to collective self-determination, insisting that inter-communal aggression is the major and almost only legitimate casus belli and that humanitarian intervention is almost never justified.

      As Walzer bases his just-war theory on the claim that war has a moral reality and his theory of jus ad bellum on the war convention that he takes to be the product of that reality, Wars is replete with historical examples. It was important to Walzer that the examples be historical, both because his interest in justice in war emerged out of World War II and Vietnam and because he disliked the appeal to hypothetical examples deployed by members of the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy (Walzer 2015a: xxviii, 2007: 308; see discussion in Introduction). For Walzer, just-war theory must be both historical and political. For many recent just-war theorists, the techniques of analytic philosophy are a better foundation, because they lead to sharper analysis, while hypothetical examples allow us to abstract away from the confusion of the real world. Just as early critics of Wars suggested that Walzer’s theory of jus ad bellum went wrong because of its basis in the war convention, so more recent critics of his theory of jus in bello have made similar claims about his insistence that combatants have equal war rights. It is to this subject that we turn in СКАЧАТЬ